Queen of the Confederacy - 12/30/2011

This weekend, jbgreer and I were looking for a couple of good caches to hunt as he quickly approaches his 1000th logged cache find. I had a few already selected when I sorted my pocket query by difficulty and spotted Queen of the Confederacy by kailuasquid (GC1W51Q) a multistage cache in La Grange, TN. At our breakfast meeting on Saturday morning, we decided that this would be a great cache to go after.

It was a long drive that was mostly on two-lane highway to La Grange. Speed traps abound, so we were careful not to speed.

The first stage was near the house former residence of Lucy Holcombe Pickens AKA "The Queen of the Confederacy." The stages had not been found in a long time, and the first stage was largely hidden by mud. We did find it, though, and cleaned it off to get the information needed to get to the second stage.

The second stage was tricky and there were a few people in the area that noticed us poking about. We did finally find the stage and used the coordinates to take us to the final location.

[ La Grange General Store ]

When we got to the appropriate parking area, we ran into three hunters about to enter the area. They had killed a deer earlier, and had returned to collect it. We all walked together for a ways, with jbgreer explaining what we were doing out there. We split up about 500 feet from the cache and after they got out of sight, went into the woods and found the final ammo can. We left the woods the way we came in and left town.

[ We forgot our orange vests. ]

On our way back to Memphis, we decided stop in Collierville to try and finish FTF All Star #5: Along The Creek by rungeek (GC121CJ). This was a three stage multicache with a puzzle at each stage. We had attempted the first stage earlier with no luck. It turned out, however, that it was just well-hidden, so we were able to continue on this day with stage two. Stage two required some terrain crossing and we were lucky in that it hadn't rained in a while. We found the container with a big hole in the side and filled with a watery sludge. Inside was a laminated slip of paper with information needed to help get to the third stage. It was almost unreadable, but what we needed, we got.

[ Nonconnah Greenbelt ]

The third stage required solving a puzzle to get information to go with what we got from the second stage. The puzzle looked daunting, so we started to drive off. As we were leaving, I had an insight that allowed me to solve the puzzle and derive the final coordinates needed. After another terrain obstacle, we found the final stage - intact. We breathed a sigh of relief, signed the log and moved on.

We only found two caches on this day, but they were both memorable.